My vote: I say keep the current phpBB2 forum as it is and lock it totally so that it’s read-only and move it to something like brickfilms.com/forum_archive or something. There’s loads of good information in there and it’s worth keeping, but it’s a white whale – trying to keep it might be more effort than it’s worth.

Then (or before) instal the new phpBB3 (or vBulletin or whatever) forum and start with a blank slate. Keep the current memberlist (if possible) so that people don’t need to re-register and have everybodies names changing.

If it’s possible, I’d edit the old forum in order to pull good information out. Sections like the voice requests wouldn’t be needed, as would most of the Community and Feedback bits. The Post and Review should be kept, along with the technical support threads. Like I said, too much good stuff to just throw away, but too much dross to try and keep it all active.

I’m active on another site that used V2 and was forced to move to V3 prematurely to combat spammers and they are having loads of difficulty skinning the new version. Not sure how much that’d going to affect us here, but I’d be more in favour of either a completely new skin or a similar one based on the current theme but isn’t exactly the same.

You guys don’t understand. phpBB2 on this site dosen’t work, it’s not configured correctly and it dosen’t work with the site correctly. phpBB3 is a chance to fix that, it also includes lots of awesome features like advanced private messaging (lets you send multiple messages), it also contains buddy features, subforums and more. It’s also a chance to repair the site and try out new things. Plus it’s not going to go unsupported for a number of years yet, phpBB2 will probably go unsupported later this year or early next year. So there is no point keeping it until the last minute.